Teaching Channel, a non-profit teacher development site that hosts instructional videos for teachers, has launched Teaching Channel Teams, a collaborative professional development platform for schools, districts, and states where teachers and teacher leaders can work together in a secure environment.

The platform, launched today at the ISTE 2013 conference in San Antonio, TX, is intended to replace traditional venues for professional development that may require travel costs and significant time away from the classroom with a more convenient, on-demand resource, enabling teacher collaboration with colleagues, mentoring, and conducting of job-embedded, relevant professional learning, according to the company, with the goal of helping teachers learn new instructional strategies, try them in their own classrooms, and reflect on their practice in a safe, secure environment.

"I know how hard the education sector has worked to create meaningful professional development that meets the needs of teachers and districts," said Pat Wasley, CEO of Teaching Channel, in a news release. "Teaching Channel Teams allows districts to customize video for Common Core alignment and enables teachers to work across the school or district to find teachers struggling with similar challenges and to learn from one another as well as from our high-quality library of videos, which is being continually updated."

The platform is centered on video and the Teaching Channel's library, which currently features more than 700 videos and more than 170 videos related directly to Common Core alignment. Teams is cloud-based and mobile-friendly, allowing teachers to concentrate on their professional development from any device, anywhere, on demand.

Teams customers already on board include Educate Texas, a public-private partnership working across diverse districts in Texas, Chicago Public Schools' Academy for Urban School Leadership, and the state of Utah, which recently purchased Teams for all of the state's 25,000 educators, according to the company.

"The Teaching Channel Teams platform enables us to support teachers across our state in an equitable way with access to high-quality professional development assets, efficiently and cost-effectively, helping us to build a learning community connecting teachers in urban and rural districts," said Laura Hunter, director of instructional services, Utah Education Network.

About the Author

Kevin Hudson is a freelance journalist based in Portland, Oregon. He can be reached at sportswryter@yahoo.com.

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